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Welcome one and all to the new decade! Now that we’ve arrived here in 2020, it may feel like a particularly good time to start implementing some new technology into your website.
Giving your website a once-over every year is always a great idea. There are 3 particular areas you can focus on: Design, Development & Maintenance. In this 2-part series, we’re going to delve into the Development area, by helping you to discover a range of awesome plugins that will give your website a cutting-edge, 2020-ready feel.
Let’s go!
#1: Typeform – Make your website’s user experience more personal with futuristic, conversational forms.
Contact forms, contact forms, contact forms. They’re one of the most inherent features of any website. Everybody has an opinion on how to do them right, and how to do them wrong. What constitutes a form that is too long? What data is really relevant to ask? How can you display your forms to be as enticing as possible, while also being easy for your users to complete?
We’ve found what we feel is the ultimate solution in ultra-modern, extremely user-friendly and effective forms in the Typeform plugin. This plugin offers contact forms that give your users a futuristic, conversational experience. They’re also capable of clever conditional logic, meaning you can alter the questions your form will ask your users based on their answers to previous questions. Whether you’re creating contact forms, quizzes, feedback surveys or even want to create a form that will guide your users through a purchase (including processing the transaction), Typeform is definitely worth checking out.
Have a play with some of their examples to get a feel for how Typeforms make filling in forms a whole new, far more interactive and interesting experience.
#2: Zendesk Chatbot – Improve your website’s navigation and functionality with super handy artificial intelligence.
Chatbots are usually considered a contentious feature for a website to have. Have you ever been looking for support on a website, and had to jump through hoops to avoid talking to a chatbot in order to speak to a real person? It’s a familiar and frustrating scenario. Chatbots are often implemented to save on support staffing costs, and this, unfortunately, can lead to a degradation in user experience. But when implemented well, and not used as a firewall for human support, chatbots can be a useful tool for your visitors to very quickly find what they’re looking for.
Chatbots should ideally complement human support, without hindering it. If your users wish to speak to a human, there should be a quick and clear path for them to make this request. But say, for example, they’re experiencing a common issue that can be answered with a helpdesk article, or they wish to submit information on a particular case or find a particular area or page on your website, this is where a chatbot can quickly and effectively guide users to their destination – saving both of you time.
Enter Zendesk Chatbot, compatible with basically any website by integrating seamlessly with Zendesk’s live chat software. If you’re looking to scale up your website to help take on some of your support load, this could definitely be an investment worth making!
#3: Business Reviews Bundle – Improve user trust with genuine, embedded reviews from trusted, authenticated sources.
Reviews are a critical aspect of selling any service or product over the internet. But over time, visitors have become wary when it comes to believing everything they read online – particularly user reviews. Many a company has been exposed for either paying for reviews, coercing staff members into writing positive reviews or just plain writing their own fakes.
Simply copying and pasting some reviews on your website is no longer sufficient. Users aren’t likely to trust their legitimacy. That’s where Business Reviews Bundle comes in. This plugin uses the Google and Facebook APIs to dynamically sync and embed reviews from their relevant platforms, complete with official branding, logos and links back to the original reviews. That way, should users choose to do their research, they can easily verify the authenticity of the reviews being shown.
Having the Google and Facebook branding alongside your reviews also gives a greater sense of authority and officiality.
Don’t forget to check out part 2 of our series to find out which 3 additional plugins we’ve collated as some of the best options to get your website 2020-ready.
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